So far, most drugs developed to treat Alzheimer’s have not shown good practical results (Credit: Reproduction/Freepik)
Researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Israel claim to have created a compound that is effective in preventing the progression of Alzheimer’s disease when diagnosed in the pre-symptomatic stages. The discovery was published in the December 2022 issue of the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
According to the international NGO Alzheimer’s Disease International, more than 55 million people worldwide were living with the neurodegenerative disease in 2020. The estimate is that this number will grow a lot in 10 years, reaching 78 million in 2030 and more than double by 2050, reaching 139 million people globally.
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So far, most drugs developed to treat Alzheimer’s have not shown good practical results, mainly because they use the wrong biomarkers or are not recommended for patients with signs of the disease. Once symptoms appear, many neural cells responsible for memory and cognition are likely already damaged and cannot be repaired.
According to the American website SciTechDaily, Israeli researcher Shai Rahimipour is a pioneer in creating a different approach, which uses theranostics (therapy and diagnosis simultaneously) to identify and treat the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease, before the onset of symptoms. The treatment shows promise in its ability to halt the progression of the neurological problem before irreversible damage occurs to brain cells.
In Alzheimer’s, a small protein known as beta-amyloid is produced out of control and, united in the form of plaques, would be responsible for damaging neurons. Many clinical trials and billions of dollars have been invested over more than 25 years to generate treatments that can stop and prevent these plaques from forming. However, according to the American website, these therapies were unsuccessful and caused intolerable side effects.
Understand Israeli research
In the recent study, Shai Rahimipour and team developed a compound formed by small cyclic abiotic peptides (sets of amino acids) and drugs that proved to be effective in tests with guinea pigs in diagnosing the pre-symptomatic stage of neurodegenerative disease and in treating the disease. When the scientists added this therapy to a small amount of beta-amyloid proteins, it blocked the production of plaques, reveals SciTechDaily.
In the next step, the researchers incubated human neurons with the toxic proteins and were exposed to the cyclic peptides. Most of the neurons remained alive, but those in the control group, which did not receive the therapy, were severely damaged and died.
In another stage, tests of the effectiveness of the cyclic peptides were carried out in C. elegans worms genetically modified to develop symptoms similar to those of Alzheimer’s. The researchers observed that by giving the worms the cyclic peptides, their survival was dramatically extended, in addition to preventing the onset of the disease, suggesting that the process of plaque formation can be stopped in the early stages.
As the American website shows, in tests with mice, also genetically modified to have Alzheimer’s, a radioactive version of the cyclic peptides allowed presymptomatic diagnosis through positron emission tomography, a technique widely used in hospitals. Israeli scientists were able to detect the first beta amyloid plaques in the thalamus (area of the brain that relays motor and sensory signals to the cortex) in pre-symptomatic guinea pigs before they spread to other parts.
Then, the transgenic mice were treated with cyclic peptides and observed for a while to assess memory and the amount of beta amyloid present in the brain. Through imaging tests, the researchers found that the guinea pigs did not generate substantial amounts of the dangerous protein and, consequently, did not develop any signs of Alzheimer’s.
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